New $90 eight-inch Fire: Could Amazon have given ebooks a little more love with a better screen and other goodies?

On the plus side, the Fire is a lot for $90. Up to 12 hours of battery life. A 1.3 GHz quadcore CPU. 1.5G of RAM. 16G of built-in storage in the basic configuration ($120 for the 32G model). 200GB more storage via a microSD card slot. Stereo speakers with Dolby sound. Forthcoming access to Alexa. Front and back cameras, even if their resolutions could be better.

And if you’re a book lover? “Choose from millions of Kindle e-book and magazine titles. Connect with the largest online community of book lovers on Goodreads. Discover over a million titles with a Kindle Unlimited subscription. Also, listen to your favorite books with Audible. Plus, enjoy exclusive Kindle features you only get from Amazon like X-Ray, Whispersync, Vocabulary Builder, Page Flip, Blue Shade and more.”

Still, could Amazon have done even more for book lovers. How about a higher-resolution screen than the current 189 ppi / 1280 x 800 one, which is adequate but far from optimal? Or page turning buttons? I’d happily make do with less RAM or storage and pay a little more to enjoy those features.

No to mention the presumably still-AWOL option for all-text boldface, along with other typographical options that we can find on Kobo ereaders—including the ability to supply your own fonts.

Or what about an actual mechanical switch to create “quiet time” with minimal effort? While leaving on WiFi if you wanted, the QT mode could instantly turn off social media distractions while still letting you follow Web links within books.

I get it. Amazon needs to make a profit, and that means creating a powerful, affordable multimedia device that can display zillions of videos from the company’s inventory and other sources. Still, what if Amazon cared more than now about books on its tablets?

This issue of no small interest to those of us caring about books and mass literacy. Paul St John Mackintosh, TeleRead’s associate editor, has raised questions in the past about Amazon backing off from E Ink devices in favor of multimedia tablets—and so far I see noting to disprove him.

Amazon’s 290 E Ink Oasis is really a niche device, and the new $80 basic Kindle is pretty pathetic without a front light.

No, the new Fire is hardly a loser, but if Amazon doesn’t care about E Ink as much as before, perhaps it can work harder to make its tablets more book-friendly.

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Published by David Rothman

David Rothman is the founder and publisher of the TeleRead e-book site and cofounder of LibraryCity.org. He is also author of The Solomon Scandals novel and six tech-related books on topics ranging from the Internet to laptops. Passionate on digital divide issues, he is now pushing for the creation of a national digital library endowment.
View all posts by David Rothman

6 thoughts on “New $90 eight-inch Fire: Could Amazon have given ebooks a little more love with a better screen and other goodies?”

If, as I expect, this is like the Fire tablets we have bought for our family, the main (only?) reason Amazon sells these is as shop-fronts for selling more.

The lock screen shows adverts.
There are 10 home screens but all except 2 are purely advertising.
There are lots of pre-installed apps and most of them are for accessing other Amazon services that require a subscription or other payment.
There’s no Google Play store. Thankfully it’s not particularly difficult to install but even when it has been some apps don’t necessarily work very well on the Fire.
The installed web browser is Amazon’s own Silk browser which allows them to track users’ web activity.

It’s a smart move for Amazon to lock people into their own ecosystems. Let’s not be under any illusions that they have more philanthropic intentions. If it suits them to sell us books then that’s what they’ll do. If it suits them better to sell us something else then books will have to lump it.

Think corporate turf. Apple owns the high end of the tablet market, particularly with the iPad Pro, Samsung dominates the middle with the Galaxy. The niche left for Amazon is at the bottom with their Fires. That fits well with the company’s objectives, since their goal is to sell content not tablets.

The tablet market is actually better than that for epaper devices, where Amazon dominates at all price levels from almost $300 Oasis at the top to the bottom-feeding $80 Kindle. If Amazon lost interest in tablets, the market would change little. If it lost interest in epaper readers, the market would be in severe trouble.
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The real problem with the tech gadget world is at Apple, where the ‘we’re at the top’ arrogance of recent years is leading it to regard what the public wants with utter contempt.

Examples:

Desktops. By far and above, the most popular desktop model is the component one that’s easily upgraded and is sold without a monitor. Since Apple gutted the already anemic Mac mini, Apple doesn’t make one. For a parallel, imagine Ford, GM, or Toyota not making pickup trucks.

Laptops. They are used by people on the go who need them to be do-everything tools like Swiss Army knives. What has Apple done? Arrogantly flying in the face of what the public wants, it sells laptops with only one or two ports, forcing those who own them to carry about a host of cables and adapters. It’s rationale? Making a MacBook Air perhaps 0.1″ thinner, as if anyone but vain little twits cared.

Smartphones. There’s zero market demand for removing the oft-used headphone jack from smartphones. Android phone makers who’ve tried have run into trouble. So what does Apple do—ticking off users and in an obvious ploy to sell overpriced accessories—it drops that jack. People who needed to carry two devices—an iPhone and earphones—now have to klutz with a third, that easily lost adapter cable. And keep in mind that for business travelers a lost cable can mean a botched presentation and a lost sale. Stupid Apple, really stupid.

Even more revealing is the Apple executive who regards that move as displaying “courage.” At Apple, ticking off customers with a “my way or the highway” attitude is now called “courage.” That’s really sick. One posting I saw illusrated it well with the rermark:

“Courage: D-Day, landing on the moon, removing the headphone jack.”

Yeah, that silly.

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I have my gripes with Amazon, but isn’t displaying that same arrogance Apple is displaying toward customers. In selling a wide range of Kindles and Fires, it is trying to cater to public desires at a price the public wants to pay. Teleread (and I) bash Amazon for not adding features. But keep in mind that most Kindle and Fire customers aren’t tech savvy. They’re a book-every-two-days readers. When they laborous type text on screen or with little buttons, they’re not thinking, “Why doesn’t Amazon add Bluetooth keyboard support?” And if they can read the screen well enough, they don’t ask for it to be sharper or bolder. They’re easy to please as long as the price is right. A cheaper Kindle means more money for ebooks.

On the plus side, the Fire is a lot for $90. Up to 12 hours of battery life.

IIRC, the Kobo Aura 1 has a battery life of 15 hours. Kobo suffers by comparison, given that most e-readers have had much longer battery lives. I believe the most common e-reader battery life was supposed to be 1/2 hour for 2 months= 30 hours battery life.I wonder if one turned off some of the apps on the Fire, if the battery life could be tweaked up.

I am tempted to purchase. OTOH, I have two 7″ e-reading tablets that I don’t use, mainly because of the battery life- 10 hours or so.

The actual battery life might be quite a bit longer for e-reading. The 7 inch Fire tablet is supposed to have a seven-hour battery life. Mine gets about that when playing games or watching video. When reading, the device uses a lot less power, and can easily go more than 12 hours on a charge.

If you really want to extend the battery life of a tablet for reading, put the tablet in “airplane mode” to shut off the wifi signal. Also, changing your display to white text on a black screen uses less power.

Ironically, my reason for looking past Kindle tablets is lack of support for Google Play Books (GPB) which is my cloud ebook reading program of choice. Does anyone want to speculate why this isn’t available as an app unless you figure a way to install Google Play Store on it? On my ipad 1, I could install GPB as a separate app. I don’t know whether to blame Google or Amazon for this.